


You are First, and We Shall Follow

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Dracula & Related Fandoms, Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, First person Plural POV, Multi, Violence Towards Animals, psuedo-incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 11:24:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20814335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Youngest sister collects our memories like polished stones and reshapes them, forming mosaics in her mind. She shapes lives any one of us might have led, forgetting which sister each memory belongs to. She sees every side of our Husband, the petty cruelties, the kindnesses, the acts of love, and she is indifferent to Him.It is us she loves.





	You are First, and We Shall Follow

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments are welcome, and I always welcome constructive criticism.

There must have been a time when we did not dream as one. How could we have known love when we were separate beings, living sad and solitary lives? How can there  _ be _ love when mortals live their lives like islands, separated by floodwater wide as oceans and with no bridges to speak of?

We were each of us chosen, plucked like roses at the height of our youth and beauty. He chose us, although not because He loved us, no matter what He claims. We know Him for a liar, now that we have each other and know something more of what men are. Our middle sister could have told us this, but the youngest of us had not yet been born when He opened up our middle sister’s throat in a filthy alley, and our eldest was already here, walking these cold opulent halls like a forgotten ghost.

We remember that alley, how she slumps against the wall with the mud slick-slurry around her ankles and all the world is darkness save his eyes. Her fingers scrabble at His wrist; she begs Him without words, her pleas strung like beads on a rosary. Like bubbles popping on her lips.

He means to kill her. Means to drink her dry and leave her for the rats.

We all feel that moment. We see it through her eyes. We mouth her words like actors on a stage.

We see Him stop and tilt His head, eyes glinting.

Perhaps He thinks of eldest sister in this moment, as He stares upon this creature who looks so like her. The same dark hair, the same dark eyes – why, they could be sisters.

He must know how terrible a thing it is to lose your mirror image, but with this gift does He mean to make our eldest whole again, or only to wind the bonds that keep her His prisoner ever tighter?

He lets middle sister drop. She slides weeping down the wall. Her scream wheezes soundlessly from her throat, but it matters not since no one will come, not this night. They’ll close their eyes and turn their faces away, wait until the silence descends and the dead are at rest once more.

Her face lifts towards Him. We see it through His eyes as well as hers. Her hair clings to her cheeks, sticking to blood and tears and snot, and she shakes her head, cringing back against the wall as He draws His nail along His forearm and opens up His vein. He forces her to drink. He doesn’t make it easy, not for her.

He is a monster. We know this, though we cannot help loving Him. We are His.

Of all of us it is eldest sister who loves Him the most. She was the first and had no one else to love. He was all she had for longer than we can imagine, and she takes the worst of His cruelties willingly; lets Him rip and tear and bite, because she is the eldest and the first of us and He punishes her accordingly. Her soul, if any of us still have a soul, is splintered like a broken mirror. She has no memories of her own, other than the fragile shards our youngest sister guards.

Youngest sister collects our memories like polished stones and reshapes them, forming mosaics in her mind. She shapes lives any one of us might have led, forgetting which sister each memory belongs to. She sees every side of our Husband, the petty cruelties, the kindnesses, the acts of love, and she is indifferent to Him.

It is us she loves.

* * *

The boy is young and foolish. Heedless of warnings, he tarries in the lonelier parts of the castle past dusk. We all sense the soft sweet pulse of his heart, but it is our youngest who is drawn to him the most. We urge her on to kiss him, although it is she who draws us up through the castle to the room where he sleeps. The rest of us would not have dared.

She tastes him. Not his blood, but his skin and it’s sweeter than wine. In the moment before we are torn away, she scents his blood beneath the surface. When she dreams, she dreams of him, and what one of us dreams, we all dream: we all press our lips to his throat and taste the sheen of perspiration on his skin, and sense the sweet ache of his desire. She is too close to see how his shaft stiffens, constricted by his clothes. He only pretends to be sleeping.

He could have been ours.

We show her afterwards, the three of us, sated and bloated on blood, yet longing for more. Hungry and savage, we rip at each other as envious sisters do, biting deep into flesh until we spill blood, clawing at each other until our dresses of faded satin tear at the seams.

Eldest sister crouches, one knee drawn up and her hands planted on the stone between her sprawled legs. She watches as we two youngest play-fight like kittens over His gift. Only a game, but middle sister is always the roughest of us. She does not know when to retract her claws. She bites.

Youngest sister spits and kicks at middle sister’s midriff, but middle sister snatches her ankle and twists her around. She pins youngest sister on her front against the stone. Youngest sister bucks and writhes, and in those wrenching movements the buttons down the back of her dress are torn away. The dress falls open like flayed skin, the planes of her shoulder blades flexing as she fights against her sister’s grip, but she isn’t the strongest of us and she isn’t really trying.

Middle sister rakes her nails down youngest sister’s spine, deep enough to break the skin, deep enough to bring the blood welling up. We none of us have need to breathe, yet we draw the air into our bodies even so, and how ripe it is with blood and promise.

Eldest drops her head back and lets out a soft sigh. The soles of her bare feet are black with filth, her satin skirts gathering the dust and sweeping it along ahead of her as she claws herself closer. Middle sister bites at the scruff of youngest’s neck, closing her teeth around the nub of bone there like a mother cat with a kitten. Youngest bucks and middle sister slaps her down, brings her mouth down to youngest’s neck.

We all kiss the soft skin beneath her ear, the hollows of her throat, the curving pathway of her spine. We all rip at the opening of her dress, tearing away the last of the buttons to reveal the cleft of her buttocks, and then eldest and middle sister compete to kiss their way down youngest sister’s spine, dark hair tangling as they follow the trail of blood with their tongues, and drag up younger sister’s skirts.

Beneath she is naked. We are all naked; we wear no stays or shifts. Slatterns, all three of us, like sluttish maids trying on their mistresses’ clothes.

Hands run over buttocks; knees press into the stone. Her hair falls tangled over her face, and through it the glint of an eye. Middle sister arches back up, her dress slipping from her shoulders and beneath us youngest sister rolls onto her back and pulls at the neckline, revealing our sister’s breasts.

It is revenge of a kind, perhaps, since it pins middle sister’s arms to her sides, and up youngest sister rises like a serpent to her hands and knees to suckle at our sister’s breasts, to draw a nipple between her red wet lips and roll her tongue around it. Eldest sister plants her hand in the small of our youngest’s back, where it leaves a handprint of blood, and slides a finger between her legs, finds her slick as oiled silk. One finger, then two, and they twist in a slow tormenting circle. Youngest sister works at middle sister’s breasts, with tongue and lips and a nip of teeth, and middle sister draws in a harsh breath, her hands tangling in youngest sister’s hair.

We love each other, but it’s the boy we’re dreaming of, the boy that He denied us, the boy who wanted us every bit as much as we wanted him.

Middle sister lies back while youngest moves to straddle her, stretching out her body atop middle sister’s, their sexes pressed so close that their slick fluids mingle as they grind together. Eldest spreads her fingers wide, hooks her forefingers inside one cunt, her thumb upwards into another. Youngest sister pants, pressing her hips down, as eldest laps the smeared blood from her skin, and laughter spills out of us like wine.

Youngest sister holds our memories cupped like jewels in her hands and it’s the boy she’s thinking of when she spends. Not we her sisters, nor our Husband, but the stranger who was promised to us, and who we have so far been denied.

  
  


* * *

The boy reminds her of a man she holds in the memories she keeps so assiduously. A man who was loved dearly, and perhaps this is why we can forgive her this betrayal: that when the man scales the wall and flees the castle, stealing from us what was promised, she follows, even though it breaks our hearts to be cleaved apart.

The hairline cracks that have always existed between us, as they do in any family, are widening. Eldest and middle sister have always been two halves of a mirrored whole, but our youngest as yet has no sister in whose face she can see her own reflected. She sees herself only as we see her, only ever through our eyes and His.

We forgive her even though when she goes she steals our memories away. Without her, all we are is monstrous shadows. Without her we are incomplete.

She leaves at dusk, like a shadow in his wake. Too early, too close to daylight, and we feel how the last dying rays of the sun scorch her. Like us, she feels a little less whole at the parting, at being away from us for the first time in what might be weeks or years or decades or centuries – time has no meaning for us.

The boy flees at the break of day with nothing on his back and only a few snatched handfuls of stolen gold in his pockets, but he cannot hope to escape. He does not know the land as we do. He fears it and we do not.

All we fear, we sisters, is our Husband, and that terror grows less with every passing year. Eldest sister does not fear Him at all – there is nothing He can do to her that He has not already done – and her lack of dread seeps through us all.

Perhaps one day He may find His power over us has waned completely and we will turn on Him and feast. He is strong, but we, all three of us together, could be stronger. This is what middle sister believes. She hates Him in a way that we do not.

We all mourn our sister’s absence, her loss an aching wound, but it is middle sister who insists on bringing her back. Eldest sister would have let her go.

The boy knows he’s being hunted. We see him through the eyes of the wolves and bats, through the hazy clinging mist that rises up from the ground come morning. We see how he flinches and shivers at the howling of the wolves. He stumbles through his days, scrambling down treacherous break-neck slopes and scraping himself bloody in his desperation to escape. We could track him by the blood he leaves smeared behind on the rocks alone.

As night falls he seeks shelter: gathers brush for a fire and stones to use as weapons and as make-shift firelighters. He spends almost an hour knocking the stones together, cursing and swearing and begging his heedless god for a spark, until he catches his finger and nearly weeps with the sudden blinding pain. It leaves his nail black. And then the storm clouds break, rendering his attempts pointless. Any fire he lit would have been extinguished.

Our sister is his shadow, as she once was ours. As lightning splits the sky he sees her, clinging bat-like to the rock above him. We see him through her eyes, his face upturned and his hair slicked to his skull, his eyes black hollows of terror.

He flings a rock at her in the instant before darkness closes in and the rock strikes harmlessly against the slope. She moves too fast for him to see. In the hollow dread before the thunderclap, he hears stones skittering down, and he stumbles back, picturing her flowing like smoke down the rocks towards him.

He drops to a crouch in the pitch black, fumbling for another stone as the thunder crashes, not overhead, but close enough. The rain pelts down, blinding him.

When the thunder dies away, there’s no sound beneath the rain but his own breathing, his ragged sobbing breaths, the clack of stones in his hands. He must know how useless they are against monsters such as us.

He closes his eyes and his hand goes slack and one by one the stones he’s gathered drop from his grip. She watches him weep, and this too she remembers: being unseen and watching a man cry from a distance.

When the sun struggles over the horizon, we seek our refuges. Huddle in caves and crevices from the face of the sun. It cannot kill us but it burns. It leaves us helpless. Youngest sister is the last to seek shelter, lingering so long to watch the boy we feel the sun’s fire kiss her skin. Blackened flesh and scorched hair, and we huddle closer, our limbs knotting tighter, and we sob for her pain. Eldest sister steals away the pain that belongs to youngest, until middle sister bites the flesh of her shoulder in warning. If we take away too much, then how will youngest know to hide?

And still, we see it through our youngest sister’s eyes: the lightening twilight and the golden spill of sunlight at the horizon, while overhead the sky is deep indigo, and we weep in joy and heartache for the beauty that was stolen from us.

The boy unfurls, and first he finds himself alive but shivering so hard his teeth rattle, and then he finds the gift she left for him. A tinderbox, taken from the castle and more use than his stolen gold. He picks it up, holds it with trembling fingers, unable to realise what it is.

He was sleeping when our youngest sister approached him, but stirred as she brought her face up to his neck as he slept, not to kiss or bite, but only to taste. Her wet hair trailed across his cheeks, and he shuddered, crying out in his dreams. Perhaps he saw her when he woke: a trailing remnant of ragged silk, the sole of a goot filthy and cut to bloodless ribbons by the rocks. The tinderbox must seem like a warning, and not a gift.

But that night he lights a fire.

* * *

The wolves have found him and sit in a semi-circle at the edge of the light, eyes burning amber. As he sets a brand in the fire, he sees our sister perched on a rocky outcrop, as still as the wolves.

She leaves him meat behind. Game she caught and drained dry of its blood before she leaves the meat for him. He finds the carcass in the morning, splayed across a rock, and he shudders and leaves it there.

The wolves are growing hungry. Lolling tongues, white teeth. Driven half-mad by His voice in their heads, as we have been. They lope closer each night, until the boy is forced to snatch the brand from the fire, to swing it like a club, scattering sparks.

One comes racing from the darkness. The boy cries out, a startled cry of terror that makes eldest and middle sisters look up from our hunt. A small crumpled shape lies between us, a hand curled around eldest sister’s wrist. It whimpers.

The wolf shies away from the brand, but the man has been thrown off-balance. It is a feint, a lure, and another wolf streaks in from his unprotected flank, Its paws collide with his shoulder and knock him sprawling to the ground, the brand ripped from his grip. He throws up his hands to cover his face and throat, and through his splayed fingers he sees a liquid mist, a gold-limned shadow, rise from the rocks and surge towards the wolf atop him.

It yelps as it is knocked aside, rolling end over end in a tangle of fur and mist and teeth and claws, of limbs and fur and flesh and shadow. It claws at the rocks, yelping; he hears the scrape of claws on stone, and then they come to a stop, and our sister is atop it in triumph, her lips wrinkling back in seething joy and fury before she tears out its throat.

The other wolves cringe back. They circle the fire, then as one turn and vanish into the night.

Her head swings towards the boy.

He drags himself closer to the fire as she comes towards him, rippling across the ground, moving on all fours like a beast. He fumbles for a weapon and finds nothing, then freezes, eyes squeezed shut, as she reaches his feet. She reeks of beast, her eyes heavy-lidded and her red lips parted, and his breath comes in gasps as her face – her  _ teeth _ – pass over his knees, thighs, crotch, belly, heart, throat, and there she stops.

He whispers something – it might be a prayer or a plea for pity – and we drop our heads back and part our lips, flooded with the urge to bite. His skin is grimy and damp with sweat; he reeks of fear.

When she slips away from him, he groans and his hands rise up to grasp at empty air, as though he longs to keep her close. But he keeps his eyes scrunched up, his chin puckered with fear. Tears well up in his eyes, spilling out from under his eyelids. He looks younger when he cries, and he’s young enough already – just a boy.

She doesn’t go far, our sister, only to the other side of the fire, where she crouches and watches him through the flames as he brings his trembling hands up to his face and presses his palms against the sockets of his eyes, then lets them drop. He opens his eyes, and perhaps he’s hoping that she will be gone, because his expression is almost one of hope, then he sees her through the flames, and he draws a sharp breath. For a moment he is still, his muscles tensed, his breath sharp and quickening. He says something to her, and although he tries to sound angry, his voice trembles.

When she makes no move towards him, he hesitates, then shifts closer to the fire, to his cache of rocks, which have been scattered in the encounter with the wolves. He searches for them on the ground, taking constant darting looks in her direction, but she makes no move towards him, does nothing, only sits and watches him, searching his face for the man she remembers.

He finds a rock and hefts it, testing its weight, and when he looks up again, she’s gone.

* * *

This is the furthest she has ever been away from home. Away from us. He is the only familiar creature she knows in this bleak landscape, and she returns to him each dusk, slinking back like a cat.

He watches for her warily, always keeping a weapon close, a stick or a rock, but she makes no attempt to harm him and her presence keeps the wolves away.

This is the first gift she’s brought him since the rabbit: a fish, snatched from a slow-running stream. She creeps closer, hands outstretched, palms turned upwards towards the sky, with the fish lying across them like an offering, and we can all hear his breathing quicken, the sound of his tongue working around his mouth as he begins to salivate.

He snatches at it. Guts it, roasts it, his eyes bright with the promise of food, heedless of how she edges closer to him. He snatches it from the fire, fingers trembling as he claws at the blackened silvery skin, scrapes the white meat from the bones, and presses it into his mouth with a shudder of delight. Eyes squeezed shut, he murmurs something like a prayer.

Our sister slinks closer, drawn to him. His hair has grown long, curling around the nape of his neck. He goes still as her lips brush the skin there, her breath stirring his hair. He turns his head and looks at her, his eyes sunken, hollow with hunger and fear and exhaustion, too large for his face. He scrapes meat from the fish’s backbone and he holds it out to her, saying something.

She sniffs at the white flesh he offers her and finds it sour with the taint of the fish’s undrinkable blood, and instead she curls her hand around his wrist and gently brings his fingers to his mouth. She leans closer, her lips so close to the back of his hand that she might be kissing him. His fingers curl upwards, bearing the flakes of translucent meat, the spiny slivers of bone; his lips part, his breath sharp and sour, and her lips brush the backs of his fingers as she pushes them and the fish flesh between his lips. He leans back, breathing hard, his eyes wide and bright and fixed on her, as her tongue slips between his fingers, between his lips, and touches against the tip of his.

She tastes the sour taint of the fish and pulls back. His fingers slip free of his mouth, leaving the fish behind, and press against her parted lips. Her teeth catch at the pads of his fingers as he chews, the movement of his jaws slow, as if he’s afraid of choking.

When she moves away he stares at her, until he tears his gaze away with difficulty back to his meal. She continues to watch him, her aching hunger a knot in her belly.

Eldest sister and middle sister hunt. We scratch with whispered promises at the door of a hut and afterwards we feast, wishing we could share with youngest sister. We call to her, but she is resolute and ignores us. And afterwards, with the blood streaking our limbs shining black in the moonlight, eldest sister lies back and middle sister’s hands press gently at her knees.

The longer we are apart, the more our stitched-together memories fray at the seams. The three were plaited into a single being long ago, our lives and hopes and minds entwined, and we walk the pathways of each other’s memories and dreams. Without us, youngest sister’s memories grow fuzzy and the jewels she collects and guards so jealously begin to fade in lustre. She seeks for her own memories, and cannot find them.

* * *

She slinks away. Finds a perch on the rocks in a clearing where the pine trees that crowd the slope thin out and she can see the sky. With her head turned up towards the moon she searches for her sisters. Her skin seems to absorb the moonlight, the silver light catching in her hair. The boy watches her, looks away quickly when she glances at him, wipes his greasy fingers on his shirt tail.

When he falls asleep, we close in, riding the moonlight. We are hungry, we want the boy who was promised to us, but youngest sister will not let us feast, even though she must be hungry too. We none of us have had our fill and we are all far from home.

We beg her to return to us, and she weeps as she refuses, feels the gaps between us splinter ever wider. We coalesce, bare feet landing on the rocks, and pace around her, trying to reach him, but she fights us back. She crouches over him, protects him. As though we were mean nothing to her, less even than one of His half-mad wolves.

The boy has woken up, eyes round in terror, and the scent of his fear goads us, all of us, even youngest sister, because all she can feel is her hunger like a living thing, a caged bird flinging itself against the cage of her hollowed-out ribs. She snarls, bares her teeth, and we, her sisters, the one she should love best, pace and circle. She bleeds at the edges. Breaking apart like melting ice, and her hunger rages.

The boy behind her cowers like a frightened child, and it baffles us, because we can feel her fury, how she aches to turn on him, to rip at his flesh and drink his blood, and yet she will not do it.

Our pleading turns to rage. She cannot protect him forever, middle sister says. He was promised to us. Middle sister spits and swears while eldest sister remains silent, but the sun is coming, and we are all crying by the time we flit away to seek shelter, with the sun creeping over the horizon and the dappled light blotting the land.

In guarding him she lingers too long, fearful that we will come back. Eldest sister is sorry for the cruel things middle sister has said, and she steals away our youngest’s pain, until middle sister realises when she is doing and slaps at her, claws at skin until she draws blood.

For youngest sister it is too late. The sun is here.

She rolls up into a ball as the sunlight comes creeping through the trees, fingers of burning light reaching for her. The boy says something, catches hold of her, and she cries out in sudden fear and pain, her flesh blackening. Nothing in her wide pain-filled eyes but pain and fear and desperation.

Weakened and helpless as she is, he could have killed her. Instead, he hauls her to the base of a pine tree, where the ground is thick with brush and shadow, and there he lies atop her, using his body to shield her from the light. She sobs, flinching away from every stinging kiss of the sun, until the sun passes across the sky and the shadows deepen.

They lie together, and in our damp-walled hollow beneath a rotting log we huddle together, jealous and sad and mournful, arms wrapped around one another. We are two halves of the same image, but without her we are not complete. Eldest sister strokes middle sister’s matted hair, murmurs, pushes it aside to kiss the smooth skin of her throat. Her breasts press against middle sister’s back; her hand slides round to cup middle sister’s own breasts through the silk.

We take solace in one another.

Eldest sister buries her mouth between middle sister’s thighs. Middle sister wriggles around, grips eldest sister’s hips, and closes the circle. Hair spills across the cold earth, tangling with dirt and dried leaves as we revel in the work of fingers and tongues and the iron-briny taste of each other.

Youngest sister feels it too, every spark of pleasure, every moment of gasped out joy. She moves beneath him, her breath catching in her throat, her hips writhing him as eldest sister thrusts her fingers inside middle sister, closing her teeth on the tender flesh of an inner thigh.

The boy groans something, grips her hips. He’s hard now, his erection pinned tight against her. Her legs spill open. He reaches down, hand sliding over her hip, the front of her thigh. She arches her back and draws in a breath, half with him, half with us, caught between two worlds.

He makes a sound and it might be a plea, a refusal, but then, and perhaps it is accidental, his hand finds her mound, her slick-soaked hair, and eldest sister is falling back, her hips thrusting up towards middle sister as two fingers then three are thrust deep inside her, and we urge each other on to go harder and deeper, and youngest sister echoes the sounds her sisters are making, and he groans, the boy, feeling how wet she is.

His fingers hesitate at her entrance; her flesh is cold, but there she seems to burn fever-hot, hot as blood, and her cunt sucks at his fingers as he presses the tip of one inside her. She shudders and grinds her hips downwards, seeking a deeper penetration, and then he frees himself, his eyes glazed, his movements frantic, and sheaths himself inside her.

We all as one feel it, that pressure of a shaft easing inside us; we all feel his hot breath on our throats as he groans at the sensation, his hair, the salt-brine scent of a man’s sweat. Middle sister flinches, shuddering at the penetration, but eldest sister begins to spend, clawing at middle sister’s shoulders with wordless cries of passion and desperation.

Youngest sister feels both eldest sister’s ecstasy and middle sister’s pain tangled together, plaited so tight they can never be untangled. She wraps her legs around his thighs as he thrusts, his eyes closed as if he seeks to shield himself from this act.

She is with us as eldest, seeing and feeling middle sister’s suffering, rolls atop her, ripping at her bodice to bare her breasts, teasing her nipples until middle sister’s breath comes quick and panting, until the only sensation middle sister feels is exquisite pleasure. Then she brings her head to middle sister’s sex and plays there awhile, running her tongue around the entrance and tracing the folds of the cleft until middle sister rises to her knees and straddles eldest’s head, her back arched and her fingers digging into the damp earthen ceiling as she presses herself down against that questing tongue.

Even with his eyes closed, the boy feels it, as youngest sister, who is with her sisters now, is part of each of us, her three forefingers twisting in circles against the walls of middle sister’s sex, or gripping eldest sister’s hair and grinding down against her. The three of us are as one, hands and tongues everywhere, gasping as we bring each other to a peak of wordless joy.

He feels her come, hears her soft liquid moans, the way her legs tighten around his hips, the pulsing of her muscles around his shaft. He groans, hips bucking. When he spends, it’s another name that escapes his lips, one that belongs to none of us. Not yet.

He breathes hard, still trembling atop her, and presses his face down into the hollow of her neck. When he rolls off her he’s crying, and whispers something in his English tongue. Her hand caresses his back, nails trailing lightly down his spine, and he draws in a ragged breath, shuffles away from her, out of reach. He sits with his back hunched as she lies there, legs lolling, eyes narrowed to slits.

She’s barely aware of him. Instead she’s elsewhere, with a sister’s teasing lips at her breast, and another between her thighs. He stiffens, glances at her, sees how she’s sprawled with her legs apart, the slick wetness between her legs displayed. He stares for a moment, then tears his gaze away. Presses his hands over his eyes to stop himself from seeing, but all this she is almost unaware of. She is with us, where she belongs.

* * *

There is a heat to his skin that even she can feel when she touches him, a feverish light in his eyes when he takes her a second time. He cries again that second time, but not so hard as the first, and not as much as when he sees his deliverance in the first lights of civilisation. Then he weeps and prays with a fervour that makes us all uneasy as he staggers on towards the inn and life and something that might very nearly be mistaken for safety. He’s a fool if he believes that though. He has been marked, as we have been.

What goes through his head when he glances over his shoulder we cannot say. Only that he falters, as though he expected her to follow him, to pad at his heels like a loyal dog.

Of course she isn’t there. She meant only ever to see him to safety, to guard him from the wolves and from we, her sisters, who do not remember as she does the young man who looked a little like him, a young man that one of us loved once. It’s not her memory, nor is it middle sister’s, who would not have wept over a dead man even whilst she was alive, but eldest sister’s, who is the oldest of us and as faded and indistinct as a shadow.

Youngest sister guards her memories well, and it is for eldest sister’s sake that she delivers this boy to safety, no matter how much it hurts her to walk that path alone.

He glances back, looking for her, and sees nothing in the darkness except flecks of silver moonlight dancing on the wind. She has deserted him, our youngest sister, and we once again are whole.

  
  



End file.
